Offerpal Tasks offers in-game cash for small jobs

If you're an impatient cheapskate like me, you've probably considered using some of those "free in-game currency" offers to speed up the acquisition of bright, shiny things in your favorite social games. But with many of those offers and free trials recently coming under fire as potential scams, you might be wary to make the leap. Luckily, one company is now offering a new, less scam-filled way to get free in-game currency by taking a small part in some large crowdsourced tasks.

Social media advertising giant Offerpal today announced Offerpal Tasks, a new system that allows players to get in-game cash by completing what are called "Human Intelligence Tasks." These are small jobs -- such as grading the relevance of search results or tagging images with descriptive tags -- that are hard for computers to perform but relatively easy for humans. Offerpal's system is integrated with Amazon's Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing system, and money earned in your Amazon Payments account can be immediately plowed back into cash for your favorite social games.

The system is similar to the competing Gambit Tasks system, which was announced last year and is already in use in games like myFarm. Zynga games such as Farmville and Mafia Wars already use Offerpal's offers to generate in-game cash, so you can expect to see Offerpal Tasks appearing for these games soon.